👋 Hello

I am a lead data scientist at the FD Mediagroep, where I lead a team of four data scientists on the award winning BNR SMART Radio, and FD’s SMART Journalism projects. I obtained my PhD in Information Retrieval at ILPS (at the University of Amsterdam) in 2017 under supervision of prof. dr. Maarten de Rijke.

SMART Radio is the first product that comes out of our FD Mediagroup AI team! SMART Radio is released in beta for iOS (anytime) and Android, give it a try by downloading it here: https://bnr.nl/smartradio.

Stream on BNR

Stream on Spotify

We’re demo’ing SMART Radio at The 17th Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval workshop (DIR 2018). We wrote a short paper titled “SMART Radio: Personalized News Radio” to accompany the demo, read it by clicking below!

Our position paper ““Let Me Tell You Who You are” — Explaining Recommender Systems by Opening Black Box User Profiles” was accepted at the 2nd FATREC Workshop on Responsible Recommendation, held at RecSys ’18!

In this paper, we detail some our ideas and approaches of providing transparency in recommendations through displaying the user profiles, used ‘internally’ by our recommender system. Read the pre-print below!

In the magazine IP (“journal for information professionals”) I am interviewed as one of three young professionals who show that ‘traditional categories and conceptual frames need to be readjusted.’

More specifically, it describes how my multi-disciplinary background, with an academic background in media studies, professional experience in the media, with a PhD in computer science, is important in bridging the gap between ‘techies’ and ‘non-techies’, and of particular value in my current role where I work on enabling AI in media.

In the context of a high-profile legal case (involving a bunch of data acquired from encrypted “Ennetcom” phones) I assisted lawyer Inez Weski in acquiring insights and trying to understand how digital forensic tools were used in the collection of digital evidence. I did this work in the context of my PhD research on semantic search for E-Discovery. In this post, I list some of the publications that followed from my work and the case.

NEMO Kennislink: “Het sleepnet van Justitie”

For more information on the case and my work, there’s a more in-depth piece on my work for Weski in the following NEMO Kennislink article, which details my findings and concerns with respect to using a proprietary, continuously developed, and largely black-box tool for collecting digital forensic evidence:

Click the image for the full article

Crimesite: “Hoe het pgp-sleepnet wel (en niet) werkt (#2)”

Finally, if you still didn’t have enough, there’s a blog post on crimesite which explains a bit more on the (legal) case, and some interpretations on my report and findings;